


Past the Mission

by Shaitanah



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-20
Updated: 2011-03-20
Packaged: 2017-10-17 03:39:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/172519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shaitanah/pseuds/Shaitanah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the dark labyrinths of the future, John Connor is slowly losing his mind. [John/Allison, implied John/Cameron; post-series]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Past the Mission

**Author's Note:**

> Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles belongs to Fox and Josh Friedman.

**Past the mission**

 
    
    
     _…you were never really real to begin with._
      
    
    
    
    _I just made you up to hurt myself._
      
    
    
    
    Nine Inch Nails. _‘Only’_

 

She asks in the same voice, “What’s your name?”

 

He turns his head, just barely, to glance at her over his shoulder. She wears the same expression that he remembers from 1999, except it is dark on the premises and her hair is mussed up and there’s dirt on her cheeks.

 

“John,” he says.

 

She smiles half a smile.

 

“I’m Allison.”

 

“Cameron,” he corrects automatically. She should have said Cameron.

 

“What?”

 

He shakes his head. “Nothing.”

 

She looks the same, but this is where similarities end. She is softer at the core, kinder, _more ordinary_. He knows that if he cuts her arm open, he will find bone, not metal implanted in meat; he knows that she will bleed and she will die if he tears a vein. She will never need him to fix her because humans can’t fix other humans.

 

The way she talks is different. She stumbles on words and she runs short of breath and she breaks out laughing, and it’s like her entire facial structure keeps changing at the speed of light. Allison, he remembers all of a sudden. From Palmdale. Yes, he knows her, knows that glitch in Cameron’s CPU, and he learns now that the ‘glitch’ came first, and God help him, but he cannot bring himself to see her as a person as opposed to… not-a-person.

 

He is slipping.

 

She smells different, too. One day he completely loses it, and for some reason she lets him. (That’s what his mother turned him into; what they both moulded him into.) He tangles his fingers in her hair and bruises her lips with his hungry, sloppy kisses and buries himself in her, forgetting for a moment that he has to be more careful, that she is human, that there is only so much she can take. So much they both can take.

 

Perhaps there aren’t many men around, or there aren’t enough people she can trust, and she doesn’t understand why he keeps looking at her like she has stolen something from him, but they both have needs and neither of them is even trying to hide it. She whispers something in his ear, meaningless words that he doesn’t attempt to process. He’d rather she stopped talking, he’d rather she were more automatic, more machine-like.

 

“Kyle’s the brain,” she tells him when he asks her about how the Resistance base works one day. “And Derek’s the heart.”

 

“And you?”

 

She smiles, a sight both familiar and strange. “A regular sidekick.”

 

“What does that make me?”

 

She brushes her fingers through his hair. It’s growing out again; he needs a cut.

 

“A mascot.”

 

She tastes different. Not that he has anything to compare it with, but it’s different from what he’s imagined. Her mouth is hot and demanding, spiced up with the perpetual taste of garbage she has for meals (whoever called McDonald’s junk food, has clearly never had to eat real junk).

 

“I was told,” he murmurs between the rounds, “that I’d be saving the human kind.”

 

She laughs. “Join the club.”

 

“It’s my mother,” John says, almost apologetically. “She used to make plans.”

 

“Where is she now?”

 

He looks in her honest, gentle eyes and feels like a scumbag.

 

His answer comes out slightly mismatched. “Before the Judgment Day.”

 

She nods like she understands.

 

 _(What if I told you that you were going to die and I would do nothing to stop it?)_

 

John catches a cold.

 

He was not a sickly child (Sarah made sure of that), and somehow it feels so mundane, so out of place here. Meds are in short supply; there is no tea with lemon and honey, no chicken broth here. No warm blanket.

 

There is only Derek pouring some hot, nasty-tasting moonshine down his throat. There is Kyle, with laughing eyes, telling jokes. There is Allison snuggling up to him like a cat, warm, human, _not Cameron_.

 

There is a feeling of being useless.

 

“I c-came here,” he mutters in a grip of fever, teeth clattering and body refusing to obey him, “to find someone. A f-friend.”

 

Allison, the template, places a hand on his forehead. Cameron never touched him unless it was to evaluate his level of stress or something.

 

“Palmdale,” he spits. She winces. “It’s a nice place.”

 

No, he does not enjoy hurting her.

 

 _(I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.)_

 

Perhaps Sarah lied to him. Perhaps she didn’t know better. But he has made it to the future that had survived on its own, without John Connor, and things have been going great. As great as possible, if you take J-Day into account. The thing is, it’s always there. It always was and it always will be, John Connor or not. And he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do now: send Kyle back, send Derek back or just step outside the base and blow his brains out with a rifle.

 

He knows exactly what he’s not supposed to do though. Keep this up. Whine. Be dependable. Things were tough with Sarah; they have turned into a nightmare without her.

 

“He died for you,” Derek had said about Martin Bedell. “We all die for you.”

 

So what is there except becoming John Connor, the saviour of humanity?

 

* * *

 

He could get a girlfriend, maybe. Allison’s not really a girlfriend; she’s just there when they both need something. She’s more of a friend, and he almost forgets that the one he knew before used to act out the part of his sister.

 

He’s never been particularly lucky with girls. There was Riley, but hey, how did that work out? There was Cheri, but that hadn’t even begun. There was one more girl, his first kiss somewhere in the backyard of his memory, Kate, he thinks, her name was. She must be so much older than him now, if she’s even alive, that is.

 

He can’t allow that anyway. He imagines what Sarah would say. She told him she’d recorded some tapes for him to listen in the future, but that’s a hell of a past tense now. He wonders how many more things he’s losing when he’s walking through time like that.

 

 _(When is the time for me to live my life?)_

 

“I thought I was going crazy,” he tells Allison one day. “Then I decided not to.”

 

“You decided not to be crazy? How does that work?”

 

“I don’t know. You just think about it and decide you need to be John Connor and save humanity even if humanity doesn't think it needs being saved by you.”

 

She chuckles like she thinks he’s either insane or overly altruistic. He is neither. Well, maybe a little bit of both, but he needs to be John Connor for more than just one noble reason. He needs to orchestrate the events that would lead Kyle back to the past. (He needs to orchestrate the events that would lead Cameron to him.)

 

 _(I love you, John, and you love me.)_

 

He notices it the day they capture the time-traveling technology. He knows what he has to do with it. Derek’s not here to stop him, and Allison… she doesn’t know. She wouldn’t know.

 

She talks to him about something, and he realizes that she is long past due, and he cups her face with both his hands and searches it for traces of age that is imminent – and he finds barely noticeable crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes and thin whitish lines of scars that he cannot remember. Above all, she is still here.

 

She laughs and runs her fingers across his lips, and he feels the bristle that covers his cheeks very acutely, and the years weigh down on him, and he understands with a shocking finality that his past is not going to happen. Cameron, John Henry, Weaver – he has no idea where to search for them; he has spent years in this bog and he has lost all the time he may have ever had.

 

On the spur of moment, he breaks the contact and runs, runs to stop Kyle from leaving, to change the past completely, to rewrite it. Maybe if there is no John Connor, there are no Terminators to be sent to the past, no reason for–.

 

 _(There are some changes that we can’t control. And there are those we can.)_

 

He barges into the room just in time to see familiar blue sparks flaring. He stares at the man destined to become his father through the energy bubble; and once again he is a second too late.

 

“Kyle,” he whispers, or screams, or both.

 

Kyle smiles at him, his image slightly distorted by the forcefield, the paragon of trust and innocence and loyalty. And John bites his lip, thinking that a new spiral has begun, a new tragic farce, but starring different actors.

 

“Just… do your job,” John whispers. He is not certain that Kyle has heard him, but whatever. He knows. In every possible future, he knows. Because Kyle Reese has always loved Sarah Connor. Kyle Reese has crossed time for her.

 

There was a girl once, John thinks as he staggers back to Allison, shaking as if in a fever. Not exactly a girl, though. Not a girl at all. But he’s crossed time for her, too. Shouldn’t that count for something?

 

Should it?..


End file.
